ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

And round, and round it goes. . .

Here is an Arab writer who gets it right.

Stop gloating


By Ahmed Al Jarallah
Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

IT is clear that Hezbollah has not learnt any lessons from the destructive war against Israel, which rained doom on Lebanon, all because of a miscalculated adventure by Hezbollah, as admitted by its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. This subject is being broached now because of a recent statement by a Hezbollah MP in Lebanon, Hussein Al Haj Hassan, who repeated a lie voiced by Hezbollah in his country's Parliament Friday: that Hezbollah liberated Lebanon in 2000 and gained a victory against Israel in 2006. This has become Hezbollah's leitmotif both inside and outside Lebanon, and they like to dub it the "Divine Victory."


Hezbollah's sheikh and his cohorts have forgotten that Israel withdrew from Lebanon on its own accord when it saw that there was no justification to prolong its stay there. Ehud Barrak announced the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon a year after he assumed power. That was how Lebanon got liberated, and Nasrallah and his followers should stop filling our heads with their stale slogans.

Regarding Hezbollah's claim that it won the war against Israel last July, which was also admitted by Israel, it should be remembered that this so-called victory proved very costly to Lebanon both materially and in terms of human lives at a scale never seen before ?- not even during the 15-year civil war. The defeat from the point of view of Israel was not that they could not wreak havoc in Lebanon or remove Hezbollah from the south of the country, but their inability to kill Nasrallah himself. Israel could not find his hideout, and there were also indications that he had escaped to Iran during the war. Nasrallah is not very different from the Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein, who went into hiding for 8 months before he was caught like a rat from a spider hole. Neither is he different from Osama Bin Laden, who is still being pursued, or some Taleban leaders who are on the run, dodging the radars of the allies.

Even more surprising in the statement made by the Hezbollah MP was when he said that his group was protecting the Lebanese constitution. Which constitution does he or his ilk in Tehran and Damascus respect? Let's not forget Hezbollah boycotted the presidential elections in Lebanon. Neutral observers of the situation in Lebanon would readily agree that Hezbollah together with Michael Oun and the so-called opposition, who are taking orders from the Syrian and Iranian regimes, are the main obstacles to the resolution of the internal problems in the country. This group's game is up and their true aims and motives are exposed. Hezbollah is averse to parliamentary majorities, or cooperating with other Arab nations or France, the USA and the European Union.

However, Hezbollah does not see anything wrong in cooperating with Syria or Iran, even if it has only been detrimental to Lebanon. Yesterday the Lebanese parliamentarians showed much maturity and a keen sense of nationalistic spirit. Even though the parliament was capable of electing a president on its own, it welcomed international observers to deal a blow to any plans by opposition groups to sow discord in the nation. This is an era that saw the coming and going of Emile Lahoud, ending a Syrian chapter in Lebanon. In the near future, another door will be shut on Syria, to allow a new chapter in the history of Lebanon to begin with full of hope, stability and sovereignty.

Revel you posted that the Palestinian Arabs claim Israel caused many of Israel's Arabs to flee Israel before the 1948 Arab-Israel war, while Israel claims those who invaded Israel caused many of Israel's Arabs to flee then.

We know that many of Israel's Arabs chose not to flee Israel prior to the 1948 war and prior to any of the other Arab-Israel wars subsequently. How do we know that? We know that because over a million Arabs live in Israel and continue to choose not to flee Israel.

Does it really make sense to you that Israel caused those Arabs to flee when so many chose to remain in Israel? Of course it doesn't make sense. For some but not all Arabs to flee Israel, it had to be because those about to make war on Israel told them to leave. If Israel had told them to leave, they all would have eventually left.

Nonetheless; Ican; the subject of who expelled the Palestinians from Israel has remained a subject of controversy since it happened. Its simply too complicated and time consuming and I really don't feel equal (informed)to it to get into the debate.

http://labyrinth.net.au/~ajds/mendes.htm


If there were no creation of Israel then there would have been no exodus of Palestinians from their homes, no matter who forced forced them out. If they didn't leave; where would all the Jewish settlers have built their homes? Israel is only so big.

In any event; there was a UN resolution which called for the return of said refugees which has yet to take place.

So Palestinians have to pay for the crimes of Hitler?

Of course not all Palestinian Arabs have to pay for the crimes of Hitler. Certainly not those who did not choose to flee when told to by the Arab confederation that invaded Israel in 1948. Only those who allied with Hitler during WWII, or fled and are dedicated to eliminating Israel, have to pay.

While that may or may not be justice, it is cause and effect.

None of this Arab conflict with the Jews would have happened had the Palestinian Arabs agreed to the UN resolution calling for two states in Palestine instead of none.

Forget it Ican; you look at things in such a warped biased view that it is useless to try and reason with you.

It's logic! Sure does get in the way of serious fantasy!

Here is some interesting information on Jimmy Carter's sell-out to the Arabs.

Ex-President for Sale: Carter's Arab Oil Money

by Alan Dershowitz

I have known Jimmy Carter for more than thirty years. I first met him in the spring of 1976 when, as a relatively unknown candidate for president, he sent me a handwritten letter asking for my help in his campaign on issues of crime and justice. I had just published an article in The New York Times Magazine on sentencing reform, and he expressed interest in my ideas and asked me to come up with additional ones for his campaign. Shortly thereafter, my former student

Stuart Eisenstadt, brought Carter to Harvard to meet with some faculty members, me among them. I immediately liked Jimmy Carter and saw him as a man of integrity and principle. I signed on to his campaign and worked very hard for his election. When Newsweek magazine asked his campaign for the names of people on whom Carter relied for advice, my name was among those given out. I continued to work for Carter over the years, most recently I met him in Jerusalem a year ago, and we briefly discussed the Mid-East. Though I disagreed with some of his points, I continued to believe that he was making them out of a deep commitment to principle and to human rights.

Recent disclosures of Carter's extensive financial connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a monetary reward in the name of Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source? And let there be no mistake about how dirty the Zayed Foundation is. I know because I was involved, in a small way, in helping to persuade Harvard University to return more than $2 million that the financially strapped Divinity School received from this source. Initially I was reluctant to put pressure on Harvard to turn back money for the Divinity School, but then a student at the Divinity School?-Rachael Lea Fish?-showed me the facts. They were staggering. I was amazed that in the twenty-first century there were still foundations that espoused these views. The Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-up?-a think-tank funded by the Shiekh and run by his son- hosted speakers who called Jews "the enemies of all nations," attributed the assassination of John Kennedy to Israel and the Mossad and the 9/11 attacks to the United States' own military, and stated that the Holocaust was a "fable." (They also hosted a speech by Jimmy Carter.) To its credit, Harvard turned the money back. To his discredit, Carter did not.

Jimmy Carter was, of course, aware of Harvard's decision, since it was highly publicized. Yet he kept the money. Indeed, this is what he said in accepting the funds: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al- Nahyan." Carter's personal friend, it turns out, was an unredeemable anti-Semite and all-around bigot.

In reading Carter's statements, I was reminded of the bad old Harvard of the nineteen thirties, which continued to honor Nazi academics after the anti-Semitic policies of Hitler's government became clear. Harvard of the nineteen thirties was complicit in evil. I sadly concluded that Jimmy Carter of the twenty-first century has become complicit in evil.

The extent of Carter's financial support from, and even dependence on, dirty money is still not fully known. What we do know is deeply troubling. Carter and his Center have accepted millions of dollars from suspect sources, beginning with the bail-out of the Carter family peanut business in the late 1970s by BCCI, a now-defunct and virulently anti-Israeli bank indirectly controlled by the Saudi Royal family, and among whose principal investors is Carter's friend, Sheikh Zayed. Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of the bank, gave Carter "$500,000 to help the former president establish his center...[and] more than $10 million to Mr. Carter's different projects." Carter gladly accepted the money, though Abedi had called his bank?-ostensibly the source of his funding?-"the best way to fight the evil influence of the Zionists." BCCI isn't the only source: Saudi King Fahd contributed millions to the Carter Center?-"in 1993 alone . . . $7.6 million" as have other members of the Saudi Royal Family. Carter also received a million dollar pledge from the Saudi-based bin Laden family, as well as a personal $500,000 environmental award named for Sheikh Zayed, and paid for by the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates.

It's worth noting that, despite the influx of Saudi money funding the Carter Center, and despite the Saudi Arabian government's myriad human rights abuses, the Carter Center's Human Rights program has no activity whatever in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have apparently bought his silence for a steep price. The bought quality of the Center's activities becomes even more clear, however, when reviewing the Center's human rights activities in other countries: essentially no human rights activities in China or in North Korea, or in Iran, Iraq, the Sudan, or Syria, but activity regarding Israel and its alleged abuses, according to the Center's website The Carter Center's mission statement claims that "The Center is nonpartisan and acts as a neutral party in dispute resolution activities." How can that be, given that its coffers are full of Arab money, and that its focus is away from significant Arab abuses and on Israel's far less
serious ones?

No reasonable person can dispute therefore that Jimmy Carter has been and remains dependent on Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia. Does this mean that Carter has necessarily been influenced in his thinking about the Middle East by receipt of such enormous amounts of money?

Ask Carter. The entire premise of his criticism of Jewish influence on American foreign policy is that money talks. It is Carter?-not me?-who has made the point that if politicians receive money from Jewish sources, then they are not free to decide issues regarding the Middle East for themselves. It is Carter, not me, who has argued that distinguished reporters cannot honestly report on the Middle East because they are being paid by Jewish money. So, by Carter's own standards, it would be almost economically "suicidal" for Carter "to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine."

By Carter's own standards, therefore, his views on the Middle East must be discounted. It is certainly possible that he now believes them. Money, particularly large amounts of money, has a way of persuading people to a particular position. It would not surprise me if Carter, having received so much Arab money, is now honestly committed to their cause. But his failure to disclose the extent of his financial dependence on Arab money, and the absence of any self reflection on whether the receipt of this money has unduly influenced his views, is a form of deception bordering on corruption.

I have met cigarette lobbyists, who are supported by the cigarette industry, and who have come to believe honestly that cigarettes are merely a safe form of adult recreation, that cigarettes are not addicting and that the cigarette industry is really trying to persuade children not to smoke.

These people are fooling themselves (or fooling us into believing that they are fooling themselves) just as Jimmy Carter is fooling himself (or persuading us to believe that he is fooling himself).

If money determines political and public views?-as Carter insists "Jewish money" does?-then Carter's views on the Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the piper calls the tune, then Carter's off-key tunes have been called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say this, but I now believe that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter. The public perception of his integrity is extraordinarily high. His real integrity, it now turns out, is extraordinarily low. He is no better than so many former American politicians who, after leaving public life, sell themselves to the highest bidder and become lobbyists for despicable causes. That is now Jimmy Carter's sad legacy.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard. His most recent book is "Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways" (Norton, 2006).

I disagree with Dershowitz on most issues relating to politics.

Independent Online

Olmert: 'If talks fail, Israel will be finished'
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

Published: 30 November 2007

The state of Israel would be "finished" if prospects of a two-state solution collapsed, its Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has warned. Two opinion polls have shown widespread scepticism among the Israeli public about this week's Annapolis summit.

Mr Olmert told the liberal daily Haaretz: "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."

Mr Olmert's warning - raising however obliquely a highly sensitive comparison with apartheid South Africa - came as a poll in the newspaper showed that only 17 per cent thought the Annapolis conference a "success" - compared with 42 per cent who thought it was a "failure".

A similar poll in Yedhiot Ahronot showed 50 per cent judging the conference a failure, with 83 per cent saying they need not expect a "final status" agreement by the end of 2008, the timetable fixed by the summit.

Mr Olmert appeared to be half-borrowing an argument used by the Israeli left and increasing numbers of Palestinians that if the occupation is not swiftly ended and a Palestinian state established, the alternative is a single state in which both Palestinians and Israelis would eventually have equal rights - negating Israel's status as a "Jewish democratic state".

Unlike those critics of Israeli policy hitherto, he was careful not to declare explicitly that time for a two-state solution was running out, or venture a prediction of when such a "collapse" of the two-state solution might take place. Nor did he repeat the specific warning by the Israeli writer Amos Oz last week that the collapse of current efforts to negotiate a solution might lead to that very "demise" of the two-state solution. Oz said that the two alternatives to such a solution were either a single state or an "Israeli apartheid regime".

On the other hand his relatively apocalyptic warning is likely to be quoted back at him if the year of negotiations ushered in by Annapolis ends in the failure that most Israelis appear to expect.

Mr Olmert insisted that he had said similar things in an interview with the newspaper four years ago. In that interview, however. Mr Olmert was contemplating unilateral withdrawal from large parts of the occupied territories and strongly denounced the "Geneva Accord" - reached between the left-wing Israeli politician Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, now a key Palestinian negotiator. The Geneva proposals - based on 1967 borders with "modifications" requiring an equal land swap, East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital and extensive compensation for refugees - is thought to be close to the minimum that the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, might seek to accept in any final status agreement.

The Haaretz poll indicated that despite their scepticism about the prospect of a negotiated agreement, 53 per cent wanted one on the main issues, with 38 per cent objecting to such an agreement.

The poll also showed that 22 per cent were now satisfied with Mr Olmert as Prime Minister after a slow rise since his record slump in popularity after the Lebanon war.

The police yesterday recommended against prosecuting him over his handling of the privatisation of the Bank Leumi when he was finance minister, citing a "lack of evidence" that he had interfered to benefit a friend.

* Four Hamas militants were killed by air strikes in southern Gaza last night after what the military said was a rise in mortar and Qassam rocket attacks on Israel over the past week.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3209894.ece

-------------------

The biggest fear of the Zionists is that their ethnocentrically oppressive and discriminatory state of Israel will become a singular, democratic and egalitarian nation for both Jews and Palestine. As Olmert says, fretting over the possible collapse of the two state solution, "then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."

The reality to which the Israeli writer Amos Oz is completely oblivious to is that Israel by all intents and purposes already is an apartheid state, and has been since it ethnically cleansed most of its population of Palestinians during the 1948 war, through to its concentration of the Palestinians in the West Bank into increasingly circumscribed camps as it slowly and methodically expropriates more and more West Bank territory.

The one truly just and moral solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict is the establishment of a singular, pluralistic and egalitarian state for all of the peoples therein.

Can we still expect miracles to happen? They need it in Israel/Palestine.

It seems that Infra, CI, et al., won't be happy until Israel is destroyed.

As for Olmert, he was wrong in those statements, and was hardly speaking for the vast majority of Israelis.

Israel is already an inclusive and tolerant democracy. Its enemies here and elsewhere feel otherwise because Israel defends itself, and even retaliates on occasion. They should look to Palestine, and the other Arab countries, in which minorities are persecuted or murdered. Interestingly, many of those people have sought, and received, asylum in Israel.

Infra, CI, had, say, German-Americans moved to Germany before WWII to help Germany, would you be pushing for their, and their heir's, repatriation to the USA? Be honest!

Advocate: It seems that Infra, CI, et al., won't be happy until Israel is destroyed.

Israel is on the road to destroy itself. You cannot have peace by aparthied no matter which country you wish to discuss. It certainly will not work in the US; what makes you think it will work in Israel/Palestine?

No matter how you spell it, there ain't no apartheid in Israel. It is very present in Palestine and the Arab countries.

Main Entry: apart·heid
Function: noun
Pronunciation: &-'pär-"tAt, -"tīt
Etymology: Afrikaans, from Dutch, from apart apart + -heid -hood
1 : racial segregation ; specifically : a policy of segregation and political and economic discrimination against non-European groups in the Republic of So. Africa
2 : SEPARATION , SEGREGATION <I> <sexual>

Merriam-Webster

Subject: Wailing Wall


>A female CNN journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been
>going to the Western Wall to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long
>time.
>
> So she went to check it out. She went to the Western Wall and there he
> was, walking slowly up to the holy site.
>
> She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave,
> using a cane and moving very slowly, she approached him for an interview.
> "Pardon me, sir, I'm Rebecca Smith from CNN. What's your name?
>
> "Morris Fishbien," he replied.
>
> "Sir, how long have you been coming to the Western Wall and praying?"
>
> "For about 60 years."
>
> "60 years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?"
>
> "I pray for peace between t he Christians, Jews and the Muslims."
>
> "I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop. "
>
> "I pray for all our children to grow up safely as responsible adults, and
> to love their fellow man."
>
> "How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?"
>
> "Like I'm talkin' to a f---in' wall."

Advocate, You may continue to deny the aparthied of Israel, but facts cannot be washed away with myopia.

http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=208373